The Friendly Atheist has a great new post addressing the teaching of modesty in Beit Yaakov, an Orthodox Jewish school in Lakewood, New York. It illustrates perfectly the disjuncture between the modesty doctrine (fear and shame-based covering of the female body) and the more expansive virtue called modesty, which is basically synonymous with humility. A concerned parent shared a [Read More…]

Saliha at Azizatu Nafsiha has begun to write a beautiful, thoughtful series about wrestling with faith and gender expectations as an African American Shi’a Muslim woman. It’s called “Coming Into My Own,” a theme to which most of my readers will relate. Her writing is lucid, elegant and transparent in its depth. I highly recommend following this [Read More…]

Whenever I punish myself by reading evangelical-fundamentalist blog posts about modesty, I run into images like this. Not only do such images read like posters from the Department of Missing the Point, they reveal the kind of mindset that the modesty doctrine creates in young women. “Modestly” dressed women still live in a world in [Read More…]